Liaw Ee Jin’s individual curation
This is a poster to encourage female victims of abuse and violence to not suffer in silence and have the courage to speak up and seek help. This poster inspires me as it has featured and used what most women can relate to; jewellery and happiness they have received at the beginning of their own marriage. This poster interestingly uses the same arm to show the strong impact and relevance, a sort of before and after effect. It effectively uses the contrast of colour to illustrate the happy mood of marriage, and the sad mood of abuse. The poster uses the first persona “I”, which makes the poster more personal which intrigues people to look at it and relate to it. It is clear with the props used; jewellery and painted nails that they are targeting women as the victims of abuse. Our project targets men as victims of abuse and violence, and I believe that we can extract the idea of the poster, to remind men what they were promised from the marriage vows and if the vows are being fulfilled or not, thus showing a before and after effect as well.
This poster uses gender stereotypes of heels to represent woman and boots to represent man. It uses visual cues like colour to show that the brown boot shows strength over the vulnerable soft pink heel. It also uses gestalt where the size of the brown boot is bigger than the pink heel which show superiority and the control of power of man. There’s also dirt or soil on the sole of the boot stepping on the pink heel, it can be inferred that men are stepping over women, tainting and abusing them physically and mentally. Our project aims to inform and change community’s perspective that men too can be the victim of abuse in a relationship. These men too need help and support which can be offered by the community when they see such cases of abuse. The essence of the idea of the poster which uses gender stereotypes can be extracted to illustrate our point and raise awareness to the community. For example, we can use red high heels to represent authoritative females in a relationship as the abuser and old, worn-out slippers to represent the abused men.
